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UN health agency calls for industry investment in new diagnostic tools to curb TB

UN health agency calls for industry investment in new diagnostic tools to curb TB

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With most of the estimated 9 million people who develop active tuberculosis every year still not receiving laboratory-confirmed diagnoses, the United Nations health agency today called for industry investment in new diagnostic tools targeted to low and middle income countries, where most cases occur.

With most of the estimated 9 million people who develop active tuberculosis every year still not receiving laboratory-confirmed diagnoses, the United Nations health agency today called for industry investment in new diagnostic tools targeted to low and middle income countries, where most cases occur.

Some 1.7 million people a year die from TB, many because the infection goes undiagnosed, or is diagnosed too late to be cured, according to a new report released by the UN World Health Organization Special Programme for Tropical Disease Research and Training (WHO/TDR) and the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND), a non-profit organization.

“The world urgently needs new, safe and affordable diagnostics to simplify case detection,” the director of WHO’s Stop TB Department, Mario Raviglione, said. “Despite scientific progress that is rapidly changing other fields, most of the world’s TB patients have access only to conventional microscopy which requires repeated testing, may miss half the cases, and which works especially poorly for HIV co-infected patients.”

HIV is fuelling TB epidemics in many countries and multi-drug resistance is a growing threat. Improved tests could bolster international control efforts and respond to a significant market demand. One third of the world’s population is infected with latent TB, and at risk of developing the active disease, the report noted.

A test that detects latent infection and predicts its progression to active disease could see the greatest use, with a potential available market of some 204 million patient evaluations a year, according to the report – Diagnostics for Tuberculosis: Global Demand and Market Potential – the most comprehensive review of the TB diagnostics market to date.

“Such a test, if widely implemented and accompanied by successful treatment, could revolutionize TB control,” the report concluded.

Only about 2.2 million TB cases annually are diagnosed and reported with sputum smear microscopy, the most widely available test. Other cases are diagnosed through an often inefficient and sometimes wasteful combination of chest x-rays, bacterial cultures and guesswork.

The global market for TB diagnostics is more than twice that of the market for drugs used to treat the disease. Worldwide, about $1 billion is spent on TB tests and evaluations, which screen some 100 million people annually; around $300 million is spent on drugs for treatment.

In low and middle income countries where three-quarters of the TB tests and screenings are carried out, around $326 million annually is spent on diagnostics – and an even larger potential market exists for more effective and affordable tools. Between 70 and 90 per cent of the potential available market is concentrated in 22 countries with the highest burden of TB.